A Cathedral Built to Last

The 6.3-magnitude earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand[,] in 2011 killed more than 200 people and damaged thousands of buildings, including the city’s oldest church, a grand stone copy of a gothic cathedral in Oxford. This week, two years after it fell, its replacement is open to the public. And it’s unlike anything ever built in Christchurch — or the world.

In the aftermath of the disaster, Christchurch officials invited Japanese architect Shigeru Ban come up with a temporary solution to the city’s lack of a cathedral. Ban specializes in paper structures built with hollow (but strong) cardboard tubes. He’s built dozens of traditional buildings using this technique, and even more temporary ones in disaster zones. Over the past three decades, he’s frequently delayed his longer-term commissions to help out with emergency housing at crisis sites all over the world, staging large-scale emergency shelters in Japan and building durable cardboard homes in Haiti.